"Quiet As It's Kept"

When author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison died in 2019, art editor Françoise Mouly reached out to the artist Kara Walker and asked her to create a commemorative cover—due within a day or two. A lifelong admirer of Morrison, Walker accepted the challenge, channeling her grief into artistic expression and unleashing a whirlwind of creativity in her studio. Drawing on her examinations of Black history through paper silhouettes, the artist created several studies of Morrison in profile: sketches, cut-outs, and even a clay mold. Focusing on her signature cut-paper technique, Walker worked with Mouly to adapt the three-dimensional collage to the magazine cover’s two-dimensional format. She titled the cover “Quiet As It’s Kept” after a line from Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye.

Learn more about Kara Walker’s New Yorker cover from art director Françoise Mouly in the audio guide.